Covid19: People who are in a state of anxiety are blind

From the former Israeli Health Minister:

“This is nothing more than a flu epidemic if you care to look at the numbers & data, but people who are in a state of anxiety are blind.”
”Mortality due to coronavirus is a fake number. Most people are not dying from coronavirus…The number of infected people is fake, because it depends on the number of tests.. The only real number is the total # of deaths – all causes of death, not just coronavirus.”
“Every winter we get what is called an excess death rate… Coronvavirus comes very fast, but it also goes away very fast. The flu wave is shallow as it takes 3 months to pass.. CV season, we have had an excess mortality which is about 15% larger than the epidemic of regular flu in 2017”
“Compared to that (15%) rise, the draconian measures are of biblical proportions. Hundreds of millions of people are suffering.. More people will die from the measures than from the virus. And the people who die from the measures are the breadwinners.”

Expanded information is posted at thegatewaypundit and is taken from Dr. Andrew Bostom's retweet of Yoram Lass's interview.

Tour Ancient Rome, Almost Alive.

The four minute animated clip of the heart of ancient Rome is stunning.   The wealth and colour and craft on display I think were real.  The video has people riding and walking about but the throngs are missing and clearly some parts of the city were crowded and stinky.  But the showpiece areas were the wonder of the world and would be so today.   Created by New Historia. 

Why are flowers pretty? They ride first class with us and push our buttons.

Playing twenty questions as kids, we were allowed "animal, vegetable or mineral?"   I was superior to humble plants.  They however are more like us than you may think and represent the most recent and innovative development of a billion years evolution.  They are so advanced in fact that they recruit almost every creature in the animal kingdom to help reproduce.  They craft their lures to attract the hairy bee legs that collect pollen, they add hooks to piggy back on mammalian fur,  tobacco and poppies concoct addictive drugs for homo sapiens, sugars and bright colours capture the attention not just of humming birds but of the crown of creation, our very own humble selves.   All that without wings or legs or a cerebrum.

They immodestly decorate their genitals to be sure that highly-evolved brainy creatures stop by to investigate and help make plant sex successful by transporting DNA.  Perfume, nectar and eye-catching colour are popular  lures.  They are attractive because trial and error has found the buttons that move us. An ivory tower philosopher may wonder if beauty is universal.
The garden variety thinker sees that whatever gives an organism a future (life and progeny) is hardwired to create a pleasurable motivating sensation to seek it out.   The flowering plants skillfully take advantage of this, because they are riding in the same first class coach as us, they know us, and are the product of a school of hard knocks in which they learned a thing or two.
The principle is delegate to others what you don't need to do yourself.

Masks Now Have Politics

From Powerline's Hinderaker:

"Increasingly, wearing and not wearing face masks has become a cultural divide. Those who fear COVID-19, or who want to make the point that the virus is the great issue of our lifetimes, or who want to show support for high-handed politicians who have issued shutdown orders that may or may not be legal, wear masks. Those who are skeptical of any of the above propositions, or doubt whether masks do any good, or simply aren’t very afraid of the virus, generally don’t, unless they have to."

I'm with group two, The Deplorables.

Good Home-Cooked Meals Can Wreck Family Life

How can that be?  A good diet helps people grow taller and mature sexually earlier too.  In past centuries raging hormones didn't get an upper hand until a youngster was well into their teens and had been working as an adult, often for their parents.  It was easier for parents to have control.  Youngsters who engage in sex while going to high school will not be ruled readily.  Centrifugal forces that tend to break up the family or at the very least make it hard to govern, will prevail.

The Chess Game, Anguissola 1555
He painted his sisters. The charming
young adult on the left is flat chested.

Over the past century the age at menarche [first menstruation] has fallen in industrialized countries, but that trend has stopped and may even be reversing. The average age at menarche in 1840 was 16.5 years, now it is 13.

In seventeenth century Austria, the well-fed upper classes had children well ahead of the country folk.

According to Shorter's research, by the 17th century — the end of the Renaissance era — the average age of first period had risen to 16. Shorter attributes this to widespread malnutrition in the era; Renaissance girls who were underfed typically went into a state of delayed puberty. He also notes a class divide among the age of first period, quoting an anonymous Austrian author in 1610 who claimed that, "The peasant girls of this Country in general menstruate much later than the daughters of the townsfolk or the aristocracy...The townsfolk have usually born several children before the peasant girls have yet menstruated."

Menarche trending in Norway

It's complicated, however.  There's evidence that before the crowded city times of the industrial revolution, menarche was at an earlier age.  Also, puberty is a larger event over quite a few years and the one can be early while the other may take years to complete.  Lastly, menarche is easier to report about because young men producing viable sperm don't have an easy to detect event.

Be Yourself. Everyone Else Is Already Taken.

Good advice!  It was hard to apply before my hair turned grey, before raising a family and the shocks of running a small business.   "Everyone else is already taken" is inescapably obvious and true.

"When you're young, you think everyone is thinking about you"
"As you get older, you don't care what they think."
"Older still, you realize they weren't thinking about you in the first place".

Government bills stuffed with freeloaders

Nurture your nature

Same genetics, different nurture.
Well-tended petunias don't sprout wings or add cerebellum but their nature responds to their nurture.

Texas (R) & Florida (R) versus California (D) and New York (D):

This chart makes it clear I want to live in Texas or Florida in Wuhan flu times.  I'm safer from the flu, able to dine out, get a haircut, and financially sound to boot.  The Texas governor retweeted the numbers:

President just made a joke about journalists. Queue outrage.

President Trump just finished a White House lawn presser and made a joke.
Asked if he'd attend the SpaceX launch of astronauts next week he said:

I'm thinking of going to the rocket launch next week.
I hope you're all going to join me.
I'd like to put you in the rocket and get rid of you for a while.

And with that and a grin, he ended the media scrum.
Expect headlines that Trump wants to end the free press, that Trump is an tyrannic authoritarian. Don't expect observations about crowding him and rephrasing gotcha questions in hope of hurting his re-election chances.

It must be tough to be Press Corps Karens who can't call the manager to complain.  They are already talking to the manager.

Behind Obama's Puzzling Warning About Flynn

Why did outgoing President Trump make it a priority to warn incoming President Trump against hiring General Flynn to be National Security Advisor?     

Trump told aide Hope Hicks that he was bewildered by the president’s warning. Of all the important things Obama could have discussed with him, the outgoing commander in chief wanted to talk about Michael Flynn.    Obviously, Barack Obama revealed his great hatred for General Flynn to President Trump during their first private meeting.    (snip)
Flynn not only made it clear that he wanted to undo the Iran Deal, he also broadcast his determination to find the documents detailing the secret deals between Obama and Iran, and to publicize them.

Flynn would undo Obama's legacy move and publicize secret deals with Iran.  How cynical is that?

Ratcliffe Nomination Now Rushed. How Cynical Is That?

Ratcliffe, who couldn't get support from the Senate Intelligence Committee a few months ago is not only up for the Senate confirmation vote but the vote date has been brought forward.  The Washington Examiner suggests that power brokers want Richard Grenell gone from Acting Director of National Intelligence before he declassifies any more embarrassments.  How cynical is that?

Ketchup or Gourmet Sauce?

My breakfast sausage had something a little extra this morning:  Indonesian Ketjap sauce, re-imagined with pomodoro (love apples) and a cloves highlight.

Popular can include taste excellence
Salt and oxygen are popular too.

White House New China Policy Released: "No More Mister Nice Guy"

Key points are "tolerance of greater bilateral friction" and "principled realism" . This 16 page policy statement dated May 20 is a good read, a how-to primer and not wonk babble.  The full statement from the White House is here.

To respond to Beijing’s challenge, the Administration has adopted a competitive approach to the PRC, based on a clear-eyed assessment of the CCP’s intentions and actions, a reappraisal of the United States’ many strategic advantages and shortfalls, and a tolerance of greater bilateral friction. Our approach is not premised on determining a particular end state for China. Rather, our goal is to protect United States vital national interests ..... Our competitive approach to the PRC has two objectives: first, to improve the resiliency of our institutions, alliances, and partnerships to prevail against the challenges the PRC presents; and second, to compel Beijing to cease or reduce actions harmful to the United States...

Old cases and new cases of Covid-19 all counted as new cases in CDC test tallies.

Old cases and new cases of Covid-19 have been counted as new cases by the CDC and many states. This is just being acknowledged now, even though this screwed up data was being used to plan state openings.  The jaw-dropping error results in over-stated bad news.

There are viral tests to find out who has active virus in their system.  There are antibody tests to find out who has recovered from or begun to recover from the virus.   A big difference but the results of these tests have been dumped into a single bin.  In some cases, people weren't even aware they were doing it.    Story at The Atlantic which has been changing the conversation, not just writing stories.

Favourite quote:

Before and After are Different

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Ashish Jha, the K. T. Li Professor of Global Health at Harvard and the director of the Harvard Global Health Institute, told us when we described what the CDC was doing. “How could the CDC make that mistake? This is a mess.”

KISS or Complicate?: A simpler view solves problems. So does complication.

E=mc2 simplifies so much but looking for a simple statement is ruinous when the facts are not simple.  The example explained to me the other day is the random number generator in the computer game, Minesweeper. 

It places hidden mines on a board and looks random but isn't quite. When the code is used to pick a "random" point in a many-dimension grid, patterns emerge but you'll never see them if you just apply the code to a single row of numbers.  The non-random element is that each new iteration starts from the last one.

Immunoglobulin molecule

People great and small  (like myself), like to simplify and reduce the random messiness of life.  A delightful line showing this tendency:  "The (French) Academy, founded in 1635, is the official guardian of the French language and therefore is charged with the daunting task of defending the language from its own speakers."    Less savoury examples include blaming all bad things on Donald Trump,  equating weather with climate, and despising all nation states.

Each of us finds a simplifying shortcut, a TOE  (Theory of Everything) to make sense of confusion.  A little kid may go with "Mom says so".    Men five thousand years ago may conclude that stars and stones are people and build a culture around it.

I end with Richard Feynman's thought which handles complexity well:

"I can live with doubt and uncertainty and not knowing. I think it’s much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers which might be wrong".

Decide for yourself if a mask helps. Look at this picture of a cough.

Only the mask on the coughing and sneezing person is the mask that makes a difference..  The photo (with special lighting) of a cough makes it plain.    My takeaway:  Medical people want masks because they are up close to sick people.   Coughing and sneezing people protect their neighbours by wearing a mask but should be at home.  Healthy people who aren't coughing and sneezing and standing right up close to other people probably don't need a mask.  To put one on is kabuki theatre.

Crazy Talk About Ventilators Has Disappeared. Think Oxygen

Hardly a month has passed since we were being told the ventilator stock of a state was the only hope to survive the yellow peril, covid-19.  It drove me crazy seeing this in extremis measure being treated as the foundation for public health.  There were umpteen different models.being patched together from other technologies, high and low tech.  Worldwide, few places are equipped to use ventilators well and trained staff is in short supply.   Breathing has to be suppressed, a hazardous move, to allow the ventilators to function better.  Worse  yet, ventilators were killing some people.

Bonnie Glick, Deputy Administrator for USAID comments near the 28 minute mark of this American Thought Leaders Video:     We help supply ventilators but only to countries with hospitals and staff that can use them.  More important is shipping oxygen.  Even poor countries have ways of supplying oxygen.  The bonus oxygen doesn't require suppression of autonomic breathing or the use of forced air.  "We know that oxygen will save even more lives than ventilators".

As the saying goes, "I'm not a doctor but I play one on TV".   The expert communicated by video and some of that intelligence was picked up here.

By The Numbers: Taking away your liberty didn't save lives. Update: Europe too

Wallethub charted all states by the liberty they took away in the name of safety and the number of covid-19 deaths they had to date.  I added "Has Democrat for Governor".

Takeaways:
1.   The states that took away the most liberty with the hardest lockdowns did no better than the others, maybe a little worse.
2.   The states that took away the most liberty were almost all headed by a Democrat governor.

Comment on chart:  The information was released May 19 but is changing rapidly by state moves to restore liberty .  The colour coding is just meant to highlight four corners of the graph:  Green is low death and high liberty.  Red is high death and high liberty.   Blue is low liberty and low death.  Gray is low liberty and high death.      The observation about Democrat governors is taken from Breitbart's article here.

Update May 22.  Europe is reporting the same, that lockdowns didn't mean lives saved. Bloomberg story.

China Legally Stole Sri Lanka's Only World Class Port for 99 Years.

We've heard tales China was entrapping small nations in infrastructure debt and then grabbing stuff.  Here's detail from USAID's Bonnie Glick:

"In Sri Lanka, the government signed on the dotted line without reading all the fine print and the fine print indicated that if Sri Lanka was not able to pay the debt servicing on the loan that it took out from the People’s Republic of China to build that port - that world class port - that port would be turned over on a 99 year concessionary lease to the Peoples Republic of China, and it’s –oh by the way – significantly situated for defense maneuvers as well. Sri Lanka bought this story that they would have ten thousand port calls a year. In the first year of operation, there were 37. And so, when it became clear that Sri Lanka would not be able to pay that debt servicing, China swooped in and has taken a 99 year concessionary lease possession of Sri Lanka’s largest world class port."

Transcribed from the opening remarks of the interview with Jan Jekielek of American Thought Leaders.  The supporting information below is copied from Wikipedia:

More info: Magampura Mahinda Rajapaksa Port - Wikipedia

ALSO DJIBOUTI: At the 17 minute mark in the same interview, Glick reports that China now holds all the strings there with the same play, also in a strategic position at the entry to the Red Sea.